Estimation of the position of a robot using computer-vision for a live-line maintenance task

This paper presents a computer vision technique designed to estimate the position and orientation of a robot manipulator in its working environment. The manipulator is expected to execute live-line maintenance tasks. The position and orientation are obtained from the segmentation of two grey-level images of the scene taken from a single point of view, and from a priori knowledge of the scene. Experimental results are presented and the validity of the method is discussed on the basis of accuracy and speed.